More crunk: BET Hip-Hop Awards or Nobel Prizes?

Televised awards shows — where the rich and famous gather to pretend to honor each other for being rich and famous by making them more rich and more famous with awards.

A brief history of vapidity

Television viewers are used to long, dull award shows where everyone has to be seen and heard, even if they have contributed nothing to the world of entertainment (I’m looking at you, Ms. Spears).

Then we have fabricated controversy, where some pinhead actor makes a long, dull, self-serving political statement that generally sets the cause back 20 years.

And finally, there are the awards shows on the cutting edge, where backstage beatdowns outnumber acceptance speeches.

We may be at a breaking point.

The wackiest awards show in the world

Hip-hop award shows, the newest of the bunch, are a lot like James Bond movies. Typically, there’s lots of fighting, scattered gunfire, semi-nude women, Courvoisier flowing like tap water, and a megalomaniacal figure — such as Suge Knight, Diddy, or Master P — trying to take over the rap world.

Rapper T.I. was up for nine awards and won two. He was controversial by not being there.

Guns and poses

The self-proclaimed “King of The South,” is “known for his rapid-fire delivery of lyrics,” according to Wikipedia. He generally casts a tough guy image to help sell his music.

“Rapid fire?” Ironic.

Turns out T.I. couldn’t be at the BET Hip-Hop Awards taping because he had been arrested early that day in an Atlanta shopping center parking lot. There, according to federal law enforcement agents, he was to accept delivery on machine guns and silencers purchased by his bodyguards.

T.I. is a felon, so he broke some gun laws with the transaction. Also, he wanted unregistered guns, which is also a possible violation. Police later found more guns in his home.

There was lots of support for T.I. from the other performers, which is a good career move, considering that the guy has guns. Many have learned the lessons of Biggie and Tupac. Both continue to be high-grossing acts, but they’re also highly dead.

Kanye West: Possibly nuts

The rapper best known to old, white America for saying that George Bush doesn’t care about black people, was in rare form last night. He didn’t kill anyone, but may have stuck another nail in the coffin of his career.

Kanye is very, very hot right now. But he went diva on MTV two months ago after being shut out again at their Video Music Awards. He went ape backstage, and then swore he would never deal with MTV again. (He may be nuts, but he might actually be on to something with that one.)

And at the BETs, he won the award for “Best Hip-Hop Video” and then gave it away on the stage to Big Boi of Outkast. Big Boi had performed on UGK’s song “International Players,” which was another nominee.

Ratings for this show must be in the toilet. Eight days? No one is going to sit through eight days of anything, even if it is the most prestigious award in the world. Maybe if they threw in some song-and-dance numbers or had a band, it might be tolerable for a few hours.

Next year

Combine the two shows. Have theoretical physicists busting rhetorical caps into poet laureates. West Coast cancer researchers can have big, public feuds with East Coast economists.

And you can have whacko economist Professor Robert Mundell do a stand-up bit, similar to the Top Ten List he delivered on David Letterman’s show in 2002.

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